For any denizen of San Francisco even lightly affiliated with the startup world, there’s a point where San Francisco’s self-reflective mockery of itself becomes so meta that you have trouble separating fiction from reality. No, not in a robot delivery/pizza drone way, but when you find yourself spending an evening at an escape room themed around escaping a startup, a potential unicorn that will blow up unless you solve the different clues in sixty minutes. After all, that's when the money runs out.

The escape room is themed like a SOMA office (located slightly north of SOMA) and players enter an airy room complete with inspirational posters, GitHub hoodies, and empty Philz coffee cups. And of course, the requisite variety of those nonsensical CEO books which promise you how to get from zero to one (billion), run a lean startup, crush it and lose your virginity (I don’t think Branson’s book was there but had to pay homage to his titling) — the geek worlds version of Eat Pray Love and The Secret.

Computer monitors are set up in rows on desks — open plan all the way, baby— and tasks are divided into design, dev ops, etc. As a group of five people that included a Samsung product designer, an Apple engineer, a Haas business grad, a health-tech startup engineer and me, we naturally shifted to the tasks that suited our skill levels and replicated just what we do during the day. You know, the part with the paycheck attached. Silicon Valley is a world which does its best to classify work as playtime; slides at the office, free haircuts at Facebook, unlimited artisanal office beer kegs but nothing more starkly outlines what a convoluted truth this is than repeating your job — after hours — for free. For fun.

I’ve written about escape rooms before as it’s a topic I find fascinating; the incredible growth and widespread attention these different rooms have got are in many ways representative of Silicon Valley trends — the same kind of hysteria that Soylent and Juicero created. But while those companies have slowed or stopped, escape rooms as an industry aren't fading away. In the last year, hundreds of escape rooms have opened -- at last count, there are about 7200, and they continue to be well attended by all ages. If they were one unit they'd be verging on unicorn proportions.

In part, this can be associated with peoples love of gaming and the communal need to ‘do something’ when together, when food and drink isn't an adequate activity.

In fact, an escape room based on an escape the startup theme isn't new either — again, not a surprise in a genre of rooms that boasts more prisons and mental institutions than ever before. But whereas the other escape the startup escape room (now called the Geek room) used a startup as the basis for a story — an evil coked up CEO, etc., in Startup Escape, the startup is the story and San Francisco the theme. A thousand little touches bring this to life, the ultimate insider joke for an insider who still has to go back to work that night.

Without ruining too much of the experience, you'll find virtual reality goggles, Snapchat filters, iPhones and more in the room — the many touches that make SF so unique and uniquely ridiculous at the same time hodge-podge completely naturally into a scarily familiar environment.

Like any startup things don't always go smoothly — a phone line was down, a remote lost its power — and here we had the ultimate CEO, a.k.a. God, a.k.a. Gregory Koberger the room designer sheepishly sweep in and mend these things for us. Hey, the room is still in beta mode, OK, both figuratively and literally. There’s no fancy Series A round... yet.

Like any startup things don't always go smoothly — a phone line was down, a remote lost its power —- and here we had the ultimate CEO, a.k.a. God, a.k.a. Gregory Koberger the room designer sheepishly sweep in and mend these things for us. Hey, the rooms still in beta mode, ok, both figuratively and literally. There’s no fancy Series A round... yet.

Even the website messaging around the escape room is spot on in aping that certain Silicon Valley brand of corporate wankiness. They hit all the keywords — disruption! IOT! Paradigm shifting! Gamification! — and the unashamed self-awareness of the messaging makes this charming and creepy at the same time. One is not supposed to peer outside the bubble after all — when viewed that way its idiosyncrasies can seem more cloying than cool.

“Startup Escape is disrupting the team building market through gamification. Our paradigm-shifting platform leverages the Internet of Things to create into an immersive ecosystem that to allows your team to unlock its full potential.” - StartupEscape.com

The reason for this uncanny representation of life in the startup world can be attributed to Koberger, who lives this first hand on a day to day basis. Founder of ReadMe.io, a startup that’s raised $1.1 million in seed funding according to Crunchbase and describes itself as helping you ‘effortlessly create beautiful documentation for your API or code library,’ his creation of the game draws deeply on his own experiences.

“My real full-time job is at a startup, however, I've had a bit of an obsession with escape rooms the past few years. So as a side project I built my own escape room,” he wrote via email. “I wanted it to be full of startup inside jokes... if Geek is analogous to Big Bang Theory, Startup Escape is like HBO's Silicon Valley.”

That’s a big ask, but it’s fair to say he’s nailing it. The games were immersive and distracting in the same way that work is, and my fellow friends/ coworkers in this scenario told me how they eerily felt this mirrored their own day jobs —- lots of work, no real reward, but somehow challenging and (mostly) engaging at the same time. “In other escape rooms you all have to work together, but here you can work on your own, so it’s good for introverts!” said the business school grad, now biz dev at one of the top three food delivery startups. “I liked that a lot!”

As an insider joke, this is the ultimate, a physical manifestation of the absurd and the awesome, much like SOMA the musical, which parlayed that into song. You can play regardless if you’re in a Series A or staffing Starbucks (clues are provided) — but be warned many of the jokes will fall flat.

Just to finish the meta-ness of it all, the game that both mocks and reveres the startup world has the startup world as its promoters, hence Ryan Hoover (Product Hunt’s founder) cameo in the company's imagery on their Product Hunt listing — and the webpage finishes with a selection of media logos, titled ‘some blogs that haven't responded to our pitch yet.’

I’m a San Francisco-based freelance journalist whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, OZY, Fusion and more. I report on technology and culture, and the eccentricities of the startup world. I’m a graduate of Columbia J-School. Follow me on Twit...